I‘m a harasser. Put the cuffs on me; I harassed the working class. And it wasn’t even fun. It’s not like I groped some factory girl as she leaned over a sweaty sewing machine. That would have been a harassment worth risking. All I did was post an email reply to a “Call for Papers” on the work of “Jim Daniel, Working-Class Poet.”

I should’ve known better than to sign up for the damn “Call for Papers” list in the first place. These “Calls for Papers” (CFPs) are one of the dreary routines of academic life. You get on an email list and they send you notices of upcoming conferences. If you see a topic which interests you, you send them a 250-word proposal and they put you on the schedule.

Like a lot of things about this filthy business, it’s utterly corrupt, yet totally unaware of its own corruption; sly, but convinced of its own transparent rectitude. It sounds simple enough: you agree to give a 20-minute talk on your current research, and in return you get a fully funded trip to a mid-range hotel full of plain but eager academics, more than willing to be picked up after a dangerous second glass of Chardonnay.

You don’t even need to put any effort into the paper you give. Only grad students worry about that. Nobody cares what you say in those 20 minutes.

I had a rather dramatic demonstration of that fact early on in my career. I unpacked my bag at a conference where I was supposed to give a paper on Wallace Stevens, only to find that I’d brought an article on 18th-century occasional poetry, not Stevens. It wasn’t even finished. But I read the damn thing, quavering and expecting to be exposed as a total fraud — and to my astonishment it went over very well. It was so obviously, wildly irrelevant that they took me for a theory guy and treated me with the greatest deference for the remainder of the conference, and even begged me to submit a written version to the CV-padding collection which every conference produces.

I didn’t; I was too ashamed. And that’s fatal to an aspiring American academic. Out of sheer bitterness, I’m going to let you civilians in on the great secrets of the Tenured Guild. There is one quality which the aspiring American academic in the Humanities must have. Not brains, God knows. Only an amateur would think that. No-you need the GI system of a buzzard. That’s all.

You can feed buzzards pure botulism toxin — put a funnel in their beaks and force it down them till their crops bulge, enough toxin to wipe out a whole city — and they won’t even hiccup. They literally can’t gag — their gullets don’t work that way — and can’t be poisoned. To be a Humanities professor, you must be a buzzard.

You can’t fake it. I tried, and my friends tried, at Berkeley. We weren’t “principled” or anything — God, are you kidding? We’d’ve killed, literally, for a tenure-track job. But it never comes down to something as quick and simple as killing. It means swallowing toxins in public, for several years running, without betraying a vestigial gag reflex even once.

I never did have that God-given gizzard, and that’s how I ended up with this latest harassment complaint. I have a weak stomach, and after a few doses of this stuff I start to vomit it back. That’s what happened with this “Call for Papers” e-list: it started to make me angry, then sick.

The cowardice. The proud, eager conformity. The tin ear — if they have to lie, why can’t they do it more sonorously?

But most of all, I just could not stand seeing the pose of “transgressor,” “boundary-breaker,” “resistant” adopted by people who have never done a brave thing in their lives. If they’d just say outright: “Look, we’re contestants in a lookalike contest,” and competed openly and proudly, they’d be bearable. Like a wet T-shirt contest for ugly people. And why not? Good for them.

But for them to use these sacred terms, the terms of rebellion and courage, and mean nothing at all by them — it was intolerable.

You see, I’m a coward. And like most cowards, I know what real courage is. It’s not a good feeling — in fact it’s the most wretched feeling this side of sexual jealousy: jellied knees, spasming bowels and rapid heartbeat; the certainty that you’re making an idiot of yourself; the misery of hearing all your friends tell you you’re stupid; and above all it means you’ll never, never get that tenured job. To be a brave academic is impossible. They just won’t let you in. They’re slow in some ways — intellectually, of course — but they have the fine-tuned instinct for conformity seen in many herd animals. A zebra with Parkinson’s Disease is a dead zebra. Not because the disease is necessarily fatal, but because its herd-mates will kick it to death for its wrong twitches. Academics are kinder, in a way; they just won’t let you in the herd at all if you twitch wrong — even once.

That’s why it was so unbearable to check my email every day and find another “Call for Papers: Transgression, Tango, and Tampering in Tanzania.” They could not write a title without sullying one of the sacred words, like “transgression” or “breaking” — the words I learned to worship listening to my father and uncles sing the sacred Irish songs of doomed rebellion. About people who meant it. Who weren’t looking for tenure. Who DIED for it.

And along with their pantomimed courage, there was the bad poetry — those damned alliterations! They could not write a conference title without resorting to three alliterated nouns! Sometime around 1980, somebody told American grad students that academic essays were literature — and they believed it. And unfortunately, when provincials think literature, they think alliterated Latinate abstractions. It’s true of bad social-protest lyrics, always whining about this “pop-yoolayshun an’ po-llushun and poli-tishins” — and it went double for the academics. “Trauma, Territoriality and Transgression”; “Bodies, Bilateralism and Bunions” — no, I made that last one up. No true buzzard-professor would use an interesting word like “bunions.” It’s not easy to be that dull unless you’re born to it. “Many eat carrion, but few are true vultures,” as the scriptures say.

All of it started to get to me. I started writing back to the earnest little careerists sponsoring these conferences.Mistake, of course. But those alliterations — I couldn’t take it!

I wrote to one guy who was offering a conference on “Capitalism, Conjugation and Copulating Texts”: “You know, the three alliterated nouns don’t make you a poet.”

He didn’t reply.

That unanswered impertinence made me a little too cocky, like a nerd talking back to the mirror. I started answering back to bigger conferences. It was, as they say, a target-rich environment. Like the guy calling for papers on Don DeLillo. Here’s the full “Call for Papers” for that one:

CFP: “Raids on Human Consciousness: Don DeLillo and the Narratives of Terror In Mao II (1991) Don DeLillo’s novelist character Bill Gray declares that terrorists have appropriated cultural authority from novelists. Terrorists make “raids on human consciousness” (41) so forceful that now “the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative” (157). In the wake of September 11, Gray’s words seem frighteningly prescient. Indeed, throughout his career *from Players and The Names through Mao II, and extending to his recent essay in Harper’s — DeLillo has reflected on the nature and power of terrorist authority. What do his works reveal about the role of narrative art in the post-September 11 world? Has authorship yielded its cultural significance to spectacles of mass disaster? What are the relationships between terrorism and mediation? Send 250-word abstracts to Mark Osteen, mosteen@loyola.edu. Panelists must be members of SAMLA.

Ugh. Now, before you judge me, remember I was getting 20 or 30 of these things EVERY DAY on this CFP list. Just to delete them I had to highlight each of them, and that half-second was enough for the titles to register, setting off the fatal gag, that unbuzzardly reflex which was finally to land me in trouble.

But who would not reply to something like this? DeLillo, for God’s sake! DeLILLO! He’s one of those prima facie convictions: if you like DeLillo you’re a fraud — a fool and a fraud. DeLillo is a whore’s whore, a corporate stand-up comic who’s in demand as the hired entertainment at academic sales conventions. And that’s all he is, or will ever be. Strictly for suckers. Not that I said all that to the DeLillo impresario. That would’ve been rude. I wrote back in my kindliest Jed Clampitt ethos:

I guess…but like don’t you think you’re kind of missing the point? That is: DDL is a novelist in name only; he’s writing the kind of articles you write, and you’re finding in those disguised articles the theses you and he agreed to put there. It’s a little like an easter-egg hunt, isn’t it? Not really sporting. And not really very good, either.

In reply I got this serviceable, properly slappy answer:

Dear Mr. Dolan:

Huh? What point am I missing? I’ve never met Mr. DeLillo, and so it would be difficult for us to “agree” to “put” anything in his books, which are novels, not articles. If you know anything at all about DeLillo, you’d know that he resists any kind of co-optation by academics. He goes his own way, as do I.

I wonder if you’ve actually read anything by DeLillo.

Yrs, Mark Osteen

There! The game as it should be played: I hate you and you hate me. Fine. A fair field and no favor, as Behan would say. But this pleasant bit of slapstick recreation emboldened me further. I…well, better get it off my chest: I…insulted a working-class poet.

“Working Class” is one of those terms you learned to snicker at in Berkeley. In fact, the entire vocabulary of class, as applied to the population of an American university, is disingenuous even by the standards of that habitat. (Which is somewhat like calling vegetation “lush even by the standards of the Amazon rain forest.”)

Lush indeed: an Eden of blossoming lies. At Berkeley I learned that “middle class” meant REALLY, REALLY RICH. It had to; there was no word for “rich” which was admissible in polite circles. Which was odd, because they were mostly rich, those people. I had thought it meant people like us: three bedrooms and two mortgages in Pleasant Hill.

It was never very clear what “working class” meant in the Bay Area. If I had to sum it up in one word, it’d be “Hispanic.” But for some reason nobody liked them or talked about them very much. They were ethnic; “working class” was mostly a white people’s term. Nobody wanted to be in the target area of the white middle class, so everybody in Berkeley worked hard on a bio which got them out, into a safely “marginalized” zone. Anything to get that white paint off you. Like: bad childhood? Write it up! Make something of it! Thus the spectacle of poets writing “semi-autobiographical” accounts of rapes that never happened, abusive fathers who would have blushed just to hear the names of the acts ascribed to them by their upwardly/downwardly mobile daughters. I remember jousts between bad-childhood contestants which went on for hours.

So the term “working-class” got used for a very complex menagerie of variously fucked-up families: drunk, Napa, cult, Gate 5, SSI…. None of them bore much resemblance to the row houses Marx was talking about. There were a few people who fit that bill, but they always dropped out. And that is an important thing to remember about “working class”: it is a term which can be profitably deployed only by people to whom it no longer applies.

For the unluckily ungroped, there were other options: suicide in the family? Any attempts yourself? (It worked for Sylvia; she became the Goddess of Victims, and she sure as Hell wasn’t “working class”!)

The same grim avidity which these people devoted to the “Extracurricular Activities” they were planning to list on their application to Berkeley was transferred to their desperate search for some genealogical claim to wretchedness. Because it was the equivalent of the Chess Club or Hiking Team at the next level: it was what separated you from all the other straight-A applicants to law school.

So it helps to be working class — on paper. And that’s where Jim Daniels, the Jem Casey of Pittsburgh PA, comes into the story. Jim Daniels was the topic of one of these Calls for Papers. Here’s the text which set me off:

CFP: Call for critical-papers on working class poet Jim Daniels. Call for critical-papers on working class poet and short story writer Jim Daniels for a panel presentation at the American Language Association Conference in Long Beach, CA. Presenters should also be creative writers who can participate in a reading at the conference, as well as a discussion on Daniels’ influence and what it means to be a working class writer. Panel presentations will be included in a book proposal on Daniels’ work. 500 word abstracts, three poems and brief paragraph bio must be received by Jan 20. Put everything in the body of the email.

Send to:

Prof of English Renny Christopher of California State University, Stanislaus, rchristo@athena.csustan.edu Sean Thomas Dougherty, English Dept, Penn State Erie, SUD1@PSU.EDU

I had to see what a “working-class poet” was, because it was such a lame oxymoron. Not just an oxymoron: a juxtaposition of two terms which were not only mutually exclusive but non-referential in themselves.

“Working class”? What would that mean in America in 2002? That term had been showing up in many of the CFPs lately, and it had to mean something career-centered and fake; that’s what that language was for. And it did. God, it did.

Not that there aren’t white victims. Fuck yes. Tens of millions — and that’s just the US. But they can’t deploy their victimhood as a self-promotion device. The ability to do so means that the user is not what he or she claims to be; thus the use of the self-description “working-class” implies its inapplicability.

If you can use it, you ain’t it. That’s the vile aspect of this self-designation.

I saw it deployed over and over, and always by the sly against the honorable, or the sly against the trusting, or the simple, or the brave. At Berkeley in the late 80s I had these two students: Dave Olenszuck, a loud white guy from Detroit, a real “working-class and proud of it” careerist, and a black woman named LaDonna Simmons. They both wanted to get into law school. (Everybody wanted to get into law school.) And neither of them had the sort of prose style which would allow them to get A’s at Berkeley. Not without some help.

The obvious option was to claim handicap. Dave started his campaign early, and loudly. He yelled every hard-luck story he could, to anyone in the room. He was crazy in a useful way, one of those ADD kids who keep the mania long enough for it to become an asset. His stories were impressive: how his dad shot him once with a pellet gun when he got home at 5 am, how he was a tank driver in the Army, how he used to snatch handfuls of crack out of the hands of dealers who came up to his buddy’s car. LaDonna didn’t tell her stories. I didn’t know she had any till one day when Dave was in my office telling one of his Detroit stories, about how he was transferred to Family Care Services after his dad kicked him out. LaDonna said, “You mean Family Foster Care.” Dave squinted at her and said, “Whoa!” like someone had topped his kung fu moves. LaDonna didn’t say anything more, but something unprecedented happened: Dave shut up. And left without being pushed.

LaDonna started talking to me after that; Dave, of course, never stopped. Ever. I was wary of LaDonna’s stories because I thought that they, like Dave’s — like everybody else’s — were material for a law school application. But I had to admit they were very sad — which many people’s hardship stories weren’t. Many were like boasts. LaDonna’s weren’t; they were sad. She was sad about them, not proud. She hung around me, I realized, because I was SO middle-class that it was a relief for her. It was something she actually…wanted. Would have wanted.

Dave’s stories, on the other hand, were porn for middle-class teachers. He knew it very well. We who’d never had the guts to do anything to upset our teachers would goggle at his stories, and he would strut telling them, emphasizing his bravery until you began to wish he’d go away. The next time he told me the story about his father and the pellet gun, my views had changed: I was wishing his pansy-ass dad had done it right — with a .44. Just to shut the bastard up.November came. Time to send your law-school application. There was a box you could fill out, something like “special circumstances,” if you wanted to claim hardship. It was especially important if you were white and still wanted to claim handicap. Dave ticked that box with an X so big it almost ripped the paper. LaDonna refused to tick it at all.

It had been so long since I’d seen anyone do something truly noble that I thought it had to be a trick; she must be going for a different box, something for being black or something. But that wasn’t it. She just wasn’t going to tick any of those boxes or claim any handicap. I actually begged her to do it; she got mad. I didn’t see why then. I see now: because when you do a brave thing, everybody begs you to change your mind.

And you fail; you pay a terrible price. That’s what makes it brave. You know how I know that LaDonna’s refusal was a brave thing, a morally good thing? Because LaDonna didn’t get into law school — any of them. Dave got into a decent one.

And now here was Jim Daniels, getting his own conference on the strength of his self-promotion as the bard of the working class. I hoped against hope that his promo material wouldn’t use that old Phil Levine phrase, “voice of the voiceless.” But it did! You can’t be shy if you wanna be a big vulture! You can’t afford to eschew even the cheapest self-congratulatory oxymorons!

So the very first thing I saw on Daniels was a fan informing me that he — yes indeed — gave voice to the voiceless. It’s odd; nobody seems to think that the voiceless are voiceless. When they “give voice,” they leave the category of the “the voiceless.” The only question is whether they ever belonged to it at all.

In Daniel’s case, the answer is clearly: no. Daniel’s claim to hardship is so stunningly simple a cliche that I didn’t believe it for a while: it’s the old Irish-Catholic taught-by-nuns-who-were-sexually-repressed story. This stuff was old in 1943. How do you get away with it in 2002? Well, you do it as “poetry.” What’s “poetry” in contemporary American culture? In formal terms, the question has no answer; poetry is chopped prose, usually less than 1,000 words long…and that’s about it. It has linebreaks and is drip-fed, line by line, to the VERY SLOW. That’s the key: Jim Daniels is essentially Garrison Keillor for the VERY SLOW. You may say that Keillor himself doesn’t exactly write for the quick-witted. Maybe; but he has a bit of comic talent. And that disqualifies him as poet. Daniels is not only very slow but very, very pious. And that makes him a poet, because poetry is secular sacrament for the slowest Quakers this side of Lowell’s ancestors under the headstones.

Here, see for yourself. Here’s a sample of Daniels’ working-class poetry:

Sometimes I think calmness is love. Peace, the small caresses and no words.

Uh, didn’t I hear that on SNL’s Deep Thoughts a few years ago? You might suspect me of quoting a particularly weak couplet, so here are some more samples of Daniels’ work:

I can pile up the facts. My father was never home. They were both forty. She cried. They went nowhere.

You hear that first line, “I can pile up the facts”? Clever! You give the list of handicaps by way of refusing to give it, dismissing it but hoping it’ll stay in the reader’s head, give you extra credit. Not a new technique (Stevens did it 800 times, far more beautifully), but workable. After all, you have to remember this is slowed-down Prairie Home Companion, karaoke for the blind and deaf.

Jim Daniels’ “raw” and “daring” poetry collection

Daniels’ first three volumes of chopped prose memoirs were “daring” and “raw.” That is, he put in things that pass for daring among Quakers: he titled his first collection M-80 and writes poems with titles like “4th of July in the Factory” — geddit? Patriotism vs. grim working-class scene? Whooo! Just as daring as it would’ve been in 1902! And “Union Man” — the kind of titles that gets you blurbs from John Sayles! And “the Foreman’s Booth”! It’s like you were back in some heartwarming American industrial slum — a landscape which has become more comforting and pleasant with every decade, as it recedes into myth.And after three “raw” and “daring” books, Daniel did the perfectly-timed blissout. “Blissout” as in “sellout to bliss.” Why not? By this time he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University — named after a couple of certified working-class guys and funded to match. And that’s how we get his latest book with its odes to calmness and babies and blue sky. You gotta time the sellout: Judge did it, making the loathsome King of the Hill as atonement for his one decent moment in Beavis and Butthead; and now, for an audience far tinier and dumber than Judge’s, this fake Union Man does the same move, discovering that once you have tenure and a baby and a house…life’s kinda OK. And he sees that as a revelation, a spiritual epiphany.

It wears me out. There are millions of them, and they will never stop. All you can do is fire useless rubber bands at them.

So I did. I sent this email to the organizer of the “Jim Daniel, Working-Class Poet” conference:

The key things to remember about Jim Daniels are

1. He can’t write.

2. Most of his poems were featured on SNL’s “Deep Thoughts” years ago.

3. “working class” functions as permission for sentimentality.

There — and in MUCH less than 500 words!

John Dolan English Department University of Otago Dunedin New Zealand

There were two email addresses given, so I sent that message to both. And got two very interesting replies, which I append here in the interests of science:

Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 17:39:51 -0800 To: John Dolan <John.Dolan@stonebow.otago.ac.nz> From: Renny Christopher <rchristo@athena.csustan.edu> Subject: Re: Jim Daniels Cc: sud1@psu.edu X-scanner: scanned by Inflex 1.0.9 – (http://pldaniels.com/inflex/) My mama taught me if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Saying nothing, in your case, would have been far preferable. The cfp was a serious call for submissions for a scholarly conference, not a call for snide abuse of the poet, of me, or of anything else. I don’t give a good goddamn who you do think can write, but I doubt you and I will agree on anything except, I hope, this one request I make of you — leave me the hell alone now and forever. Renny Christopher

If only I had time to tell you about my two interlocutors, Renny “Carpenter’s Daughter” Christopher and Sean “The Stepson” Geraghty! Alas, their working-class credentials are rather wordy.

Since a colleague of mine at this off-world university likes Flann O’Brien, I sent him some of Daniel’s work with an allusion to Jem Casey, “Poet of the Pick and Bard of Booterstown.” (If you don’t get the allusion you haven’t read At Swim-Two-Birds; and if you haven’t read that, get lost.)

Well, that was it. Harassment proceedings were in session. I had pissed off the working class but good. And as you’d expect from these hard, simple men, retaliation was swift. But not quite in the form you might expect. Did they challenge me to fists’n’boots on the fact’ry floor? Nah. Did they offer to shove an M-80 up my ass and make me into a performance piece titled “4th of July on the Eastern Front”? Alas, no. Did they pitch in for a ticket to New Zealand to do Riverdance in hobnails on me mug? (fer y’see we’re all Oirish-American heeere, we be, O aye! As Oirish as Bugs Bunny, or perhaps not quite so much.)

Alas no. Remember the key rule: if you can deploy the term “working class” to your own career advantage, you are no longer covered by the term. And these boyos — more Oirish stuff, y’see? “boyos” is an Oirish workin’-class term of a thing, an’ roight off the mean streets of the Oirish quarter o’Pleasant Hill, CA I be, aye and begorrah! — these boyos, as I were sayin’, they have washed the wuurkin’ class roight off of’em!

In other words, they did the last thing any working class person would do, and the first thing a sleazy academic snitch would do: they got on Netscape, looked me up, found out the name of my superior, and sent him a formal complaint accusing me of harassment. Here ’tis now in all its glory:

Dear Professor Alistair Fox (Assistant Vice-Chancellor),

This is an official complaint against one of your faculty, one John Dolan. A few days ago a colleage of mine Prof Renny Christopher, issued a call for papers on the Working Class Studies email list. Since then I have received a number of harassing and taunting emails from your faculty member. I would like them to stop immediately. Could you please take care of this matter. In the United States we have very specific harassment laws regarding email. These laws are based on the laws against unwanted and harassing phone calls. Thank you for your action to resolve this matter before it goes any further.

Dear Mr Dougherty, I have forwarded your complaint to the Head of the Department of English, Associate Professor Chris Ackerley, with a request for him to take the matter up with Dr Dolan. Without having seen the content of the emails that have occasioned your complaint, together with Dr Dolan’s comments on them, it is impossible for me to ascertain the validity of the complaint. The most I can say is that the University of Otago expects its staff to observe the same standards of professional conduct in their dealings with members of the wider international academic community as those required in their dealing with colleagues on this campus. These standards are outlined in the University of Otago’s Ethical Behaviour Policy, which may be found on the web at http://www.otago.ac.nz/personnelservices/Policies/EthicalBehaviourPolicy/Contents.htm

And that, boyo, is how I came to be the pitiful figure you see before ye, a convicted harasser of the wuurkin’ classes and a tormentor o’the labuurin’ masses, black wi’sin as Mary in a coal mine an’ damned ta Hell fur all the masses a wuurkin’ class priest could sing fer me puuuur benighted sowl.

And proud of it.

[Editor’s note: The eXile contacted “working class poet” Jim Daniels by telephone to ask him if he felt that Doughtery’s outrageous attempt to destroy Dr. Dolan’s academic career was justified, and how did he feel about being the catalyst for Doughtery’s sleaze? Daniels, in a slow, harmless, NPR-type voice, very cautiously asked to see the contents of Dr. Dolan’s slight against him and Doughtery’s subsequent snitching to Dr. Dolan’s superiors. When asked if he thought it was right to ruin someone’s career simply because he’d belittled a conference paper’s subject, he did admit that “it seems a little too much” on Dougherty’s part. After we emailed Daniels the string of emails between Dolan, Dougherty et al, along with a request for comment, “working class poet” Daniels sent us this bloody-knuckled, axle-grease stained reply:

While I appreciate you taking the time to send these messages to me, after reading them, I still find that my only response is: “No comment.”

Sincerely, Jim Daniels

Our response to that Mack-truck-and-meatloaf-powered email:

Jim,

I expected something a little rougher from a working-class poet and author of “M-80”. This “no-comment” sounds more like an Enron thing.

Mark Ames Editor

Daniels may claim to give voice to the voiceless, but when it comes to something as offering a simple comment on sleazy snitches like Dougherty, calling them for the loathsome pieces of shit that they are, Daniels finds himself utterly voiceless. Daniels has found solidarity with his new class — thin-skinned, tenured academics at third-rate institutions. They may not be voiceless, but they are spineless.

22 Comments

They should make this article required reading for any freshman considering a degree in the humanities. Speaking as someone who floundered around on the absolute bottom rung of academia, this is the most honest and informed synopsis of academia you’re going to find. Here’s a more general truth which extends even outside academia: everyone in America, from the billionaires to those aspire to someday be merely dirt poor, claims that they’re middle class.

2. Dirty Sloth | August 16th, 2009 at 10:54 am

This is pretty much like a halfbrained quarrel between some dumbass black metal kids about which one of them are more true, a pissfest of words between semi-sentinent hip fucking hoppers about who’s keeping it real, or just some cow molesting horse fetishists comparing how high up the manure are on their mustaches.

This article is just a bag of wank.

3. Mr. Wiggles | August 16th, 2009 at 12:58 pm

Hail John Dolan, the Duke of Depression

4. Expat in BY | August 16th, 2009 at 2:09 pm

Dunno, to me this wasn’t a big bag of wank, but rather a warning – it says to me: look out for the horde of self-declared “victims” making their way upward through the US judicial system.

5. Adam | August 16th, 2009 at 4:34 pm

So I went to Amazon.ca and bought the Exile book. And John Dolan’s Pleasant Hell. And whatever Taibbi’s latest book is called. All amazing. I think we need more Dolan articles, or more from the archives. How long will exile.ru be active for? I’m still coming across decent stuff on that site.

6. yoyo | August 16th, 2009 at 4:54 pm

Brilliant! There are strong parallels for me with the accademic feminist movement of the 80’s, everyone trying out victim the others, look at me look at me, and one word out of place to the middle class white women would get you pushed out so fast your head would spin. Yet the immigrant or working class women they were obstensively speaking for were not welcome either.

Actually this should give anyone in the US that has kids pause, because:

1/ Questionable folks like these end up ‘teaching’ your kids.

2/ Even worse, many of them end up on ‘advisory panels’ to politicians, etc.

3/ This isn’t just restricted to the Humanities or Liberal Arts.

Unfortunately, it’s not ‘halfbrained quarrel between some dumbass black-metal kids’ but US Academia, most of whom are ‘dumbass’ chickenhawk Boomers. Those who burned their draft cards now send their children to war. And do underhanded stuff like this.

Welcome to what goes on inside the gates with those ‘gatekeepers of American values’.

And you wonder why, as a country we’re so parochial, warlike, and downright mean.. but for some reason NOT jingoistic.

Sometimes I wish that the older and younger generations offset from the Boomers shared their so-called “values” ..

But then we’d have 8% of the country’s blood running in the streets for what the Boomers have done to the country, eh?

Oh dear. I went off on a rant, didn’t I?

8. LIExpressway | August 16th, 2009 at 9:20 pm

As one of those actual “working class” guys who dropped out(expelled from)of college due to being a non traditional student(had no ca$$ to pay tuition, so fuck that fat assed bursar bitch). I could care less about any of the people in this article, they’ll all be hanging from lamppost or burning in pyres soon(along with me probably).

Oh and drunken at #7, you must not be American or understand America at all, because our academia are not the people fighting our wars, nor is there a chance in hell that they are sending there kids to war or supporting it. They’re too cowardly to do something like that. And as someone who went to school for liberal arts/humanities as well as tech school, they are two different beasts completely.

Kali Yuga Motherfuckers!

9. Jimbo | August 16th, 2009 at 11:16 pm

with all the lives fucked by academia scum there must be a lot of hatred out their just tap into it right and you’ll be bigger than the Ivy League

10. Thuggin | August 16th, 2009 at 11:27 pm

A classic. That’s true as it’ll ever be.

11. TT | August 17th, 2009 at 4:19 am

Doyle, you’ve done it again (or rather, before). Simply brilliant. As an academic in the humanities in Australia all I can say is that this is 100% vintage truth, and applicable not only to the States. I’ve found that the only escape from the hordes of palsied victims now drowning everything good left in having an intellectual life is to concentrate on something practical and utterly incomprehensible to them – in my case its science studies. I also concur with the advice above – avoid humanities like the plague, or if you have to – go to some place like Eastern Europe where they still have them.

Cheers TT

12. jindi | August 17th, 2009 at 6:43 am

Here’s a poem for ya

Roses are red Violets are blue I’m just a troll But I wish I was you

13. Myles na Gofookyerownself | August 17th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

Dear Dr. Dolan,

I’ve been following you secretly for a long time. Ever seen the film “Misery”? In a way, that’s me. You’ve met me, but you probably don’t remember me. No one reads me, but we read you. And that makes me envious, I’ll admit. So I’m trying to post a comment here that will really sting, but doggone it, I can’t do it. This piece is devastating, and after reading it I think about my own life…forget it. Props to you.

A real coward

14. notomatoes | August 17th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

I remember being handed this by a tutor at Victoria Uni. It inspired me to dropout.

15. Myles na Gofookyerownself | August 17th, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Dear John,

I remember writing that. Maybe I should be ashamed? What if you’re not even the one reading these, but rather, some other editor is reading my comments? Do you even know I exist?

I wish you would recognize me.

16. breezer1 | August 19th, 2009 at 7:32 am

I anit got no edumication and i aint be that fucking stupid.

17. Frank Fnark | April 4th, 2010 at 6:37 am

Appearance is reality these days, Prof. Not just among the publishing-or-perishing, but among the hard, simple men and soft, simple women that make up the actual workingclass, who more than likely would give you an old-school bust in the chops if you failed to respect their appearances as reality.

Why won’t those wimps engage you in debate, defend themselves or something? “no comment” from a commentator??? The abuse of PC has encouraged the notion that victimhood is heroic when in fact it’s just painful. The truth of people suffering is not being told by these clowns who see the “working class” banner as a career enabler. Enjambment and slick line breaks do not make a poem just as listing tragic events does not give us insight into those events. Much of the poetry I write deals with unravelling the relationships I had as a child with family, friends and work in the industrial suburbs of western Sydney (Australia). They deal with all the human emotions that go with that.The fact that these emotions and events took place in what is deemed a working class (a most contested term) suburb and the protagonists worked in factories is backdrop compared to the larger human issues being explored. But, according to some my work is that of a “working class poet” with all its limitations. Thanks for nothing! Keep up the attacks on the citadel John, although their rapidly decreasing relevance to any notion of an academic or intellectual community might make your battle a brief one. philip

21. Frank Fnark | February 10th, 2011 at 10:48 am

What is rapidly decreasing in relevance, at least over here in the last remaining superpower, is the “notion of an academic or intellectual community”itself. Our culture has decided it doesn’t want people making a living off of studying it.

22. Gombeen | August 20th, 2016 at 5:14 pm

Highly entertaining! Thank you.

Jeff Torrington’s short story collection about working in a car assembly factory (“The Devil’s Carousel”) is a great book. As is the “Apprentice” part of Tom Gallacher’s trilogy; the “Lord Sweatrag” story is a thing of manic beauty.

Thanks again. Passed on to a successful scientist head honcho who has to resist the onslaught of crap from disgruntled students seeking endless regrading of papers.

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